Our next dimension is Pitch. When we’re thinking about pitches in music, we can think about how they move forward on the horizontal time axis, which is the melody.
Or how the pitches are all stacked up vertically on top of each other at any given moment, which is harmony.
Let’s explore each of these two in turn.
Listening for Melody
When you take a series of notes with Pitch and Rhythm, you have a melody.
As a starting point, listening for when the pitch rises and falls can tell you a lot about the music. We call this the Pitch Contour of a melody.
From note to note, the pitches in the melody can progress in one of three ways:
- Up
- Down
- Stay the same
This Pitch Contour is critical in how musical phrases are shaped and how the overall message and emotion of the music moves forwards.
We can get more specific in our Active Listening for pitches, especially if we’ve done some Ear Training.
The notes of a melody are generally taken from a particular scale, meaning a collection of note pitches. When pitches from outside the scale are used, these typically stick out a bit to our ears. Most melodies tend to move around using mostly (or exclusively) the pitches of the scale.
Sometimes the pitches are close together, moving in steps: up and down the scale without making any jumps or skipping any pitches. This is called “stepwise motion”.
Or you might find there are jumps in pitch where a note from the scale is skipped over. We call these skips.
So a great starting point when listening for melody is to try to identify the Pitch Contour (you can draw it on a piece of paper as a line moving up and down, as in the diagram above) and perhaps also whether it’s mostly using steps or skips.
With Ear Training, you can also learn to identify the specific notes being used. There are two main approaches to this: Intervals and Solfa. The Intervals approach involves judging the pitch distance between any two notes (for example, one note of a melody to the next). The Solfa approach involves judging the distance of pitches from the scale’s base note or tonic, so you are essentially identifying which note of the scale it is.
We’ll be covering this note recognition skill in detail in Part II, and mention it here just to explain how it relates to Active Listening. Most musicians, including those who are very good at Active Listening, will not be able to name the specific notes being used in every melody they hear—so don’t worry if this seems beyond you for now!
Listening for Harmony
Harmony is created when multiple different pitches are played at once. The term “harmony” also refers to how the pitches resonate and combine with each other to create an overall musical sound.
There are many different levels of harmony. Some music doesn’t use harmony at all: there’s only one voice, one instrument, with no harmonic backdrop behind it.
One level beyond that would be a simple form of harmony that’s used in various forms of world music: a drone-based harmony, where there are just one (or two notes) which establish the harmonic context, and they are played constantly throughout the music. This is common, for example, in classical Indian music, Hindustani or Carnatic raga.
In most mainstream Western music there is a much greater degree of harmony used, often expressed in terms of Chords. A Chord is a combination of three or more note pitches, and there are various ways to classify and identify chords, which we’ll explore in detail in Chapter 11: Chords and Progressions.
Different genres tend to use different numbers of chords. For example in most styles of popular music, often the songs may use only three or four chords, but in jazz you might find 10 or 20 different chords used in a single piece.
It can be helpful to think about how the harmony is being produced. Specifically, how does the number of instruments relate to the number of pitches you’re hearing? The chord we call “C Major” always consists of the notes C, E and G—but it sounds quite different when there is a guitar strumming those three defining notes across six strings than when there is a four-part choir of one hundred people singing those same three chord notes, or when a pianist plays an eight or even ten-note version (“voicing”) of the same chord spanning several octaves.
Listening for Harmonic Rhythm
Chords generally change during a piece, so there’s also a horizontal time-based dimension to harmony, known as harmonic rhythm. A chord can change every measure, or every half measure, or every beat, even We’ll define “measure” and “beat” later in the chapter. If you’re not familiar with the terms, for now just know that a measure is typically less than ten seconds long and a beat is typically half a second to a second long. . You will hear some crazily-fast chord changes in some jazz music! Or in ambient music genres you might have a chord that stays the same over several measures or even minutes.
Listen for when there’s a change in harmonic rhythm: you may have a chord that’s going for a long time and then all of a sudden there’s a lot more chords that come at a more rapid rate. That can indicate a change in the Form, meaning a different section has begun. We’ll cover Form in more detail later in the chapter, and the harmonic rhythm can be one of the easiest ways to tune in to what’s happening in the Form.
Pitch and Timbre
With different pitches come different timbral qualities in an instrument. When you’re playing high squealing sounds in a guitar solo (e.g. Eric Clapton’s opening riff on Derek & the Dominoes’ “Layla”), or low deep sounds (like the opening riff and ongoing fingerstyle-guitar backing part in Johnny Cash’s classic song “I Walk The Line”) there are very different timbres to the instrument, and much of this can stem from the pitch range as much as any other timbral effects being used.
The same thing goes for the human singing voice. Often, when we’re singing pitches that are high in our range, there’s a sense of urgency or intensity, and when we’re singing low in our range, it’s more mellow-sounding. Higher pitch in vocal lines often indicates a higher emotional content in the lyrics, so this is another thing to start listening for.
Questions in Mind
Here are some questions you can use to explore Pitch.
Keep in mind that almost all questions can be asked for the whole piece of music overall, as well as for a particular instrument, a particular section, etc.
- Are the pitches I’m hearing relatively high or low? How does that differ by instrument? How does it compare from section to section of the form?
- What’s the Pitch Contour of the melody (or whatever instrument I’m tuning in to)? With each phrase is it ascending, descending, tracing an arc up and then back down, something else?
- Are there leaps in pitch or is it simple stepwise motion? If there are leaps are they large jumps or just small skips?
- With vocal melodies: When do the pitches go up? What emotional qualities does this lend to the sound? When does the singer have to work harder to produce the pitch?
- If you’ve been developing your sense of Relative Pitch with Ear Training: Can I identify the specific intervals or scale degrees (solfa) being used?
- Can I hear multiple instruments playing in unison (the same pitches)? How many different pitches can I hear at once?
- Does the arrangement follow the normal configuration of melody being the highest pitches, harmony beneath that and bassline at the bottom?
- What kind of harmony is being used? e.g. no harmony, a simple drone, chords. Does that change over time?
- What’s the harmonic rhythm: how often and with what pattern are the chords changing?
- What’s the overall pacing of changes, are they frequent (e.g. multiple chords per measure) or relatively slow (one or more measure per chord)—and does that change from section to section?
- How is the timbre being affected by changes in pitch?